Black Bart, The Stray Gets His Home Sweet Home

I did not realize what a chain of events would be unleashed when I wrote a letter to the editor of the paper. I wrote it out of rage, actually. An Albany man was trapping owned cats and dumping them across the river. Comments following the news article on it were terribly cruel and hateful towards cats. Many commenters expressed encouragement for cruelty to cats.

So I wrote the letter, about spay neuter options mainly, behaving responsibly, kindly, suggesting donations to Poppa Inc..

I was then contacted by a Millersburg couple who asked about what I do and wanted to donate to Poppa Inc. Then they mentioned a Millersburg colony they had become involved with feeding.

I knew that colony well. Sam and Oci, here with me, come from there. The primary feeder is highly secretive and uncommunicative and had not told me more had been dumped.

I immediately set out to remedy the situation. I am no sit on my butt person. I'm not a committee type. When I hear of a problem, my first inclination is to do something about it. I caught 8 cats. I caught nine really, but I let one go. He was a tame neutered black male.

I checked him out in the garage of the old couple who had called. We all hugged him. They did not know he was tame. I had to take him back. I had no place for him.

Thereafter, he met the couple, on their daily walk, by wrapping his front legs around their ankles, begging them to love him. They would hold him, make excuses to me by e-mail about why they could not take him in, which I would agree with then urge them to take him in anyhow. The male became even more desperate, wrapping legs around their necks when they would hold him, becoming upset when they wouldn't take him. The old couple kept e-mailing me, wanting me to find him somewhere.

I knew they wanted him. I put an ad in the paper and let them decide who might be a good home, and gave them the phone numbers of people who called on the ad. It was then the woman e-mailed to say her husband was giving her the cat for her birthday. I was ecstatic! They went over to the brambles where he lived, with the ferals, and tried to put him into a carrier. They couldn't get him in, so they just carried him home on their laps in their pickup.

Since then, Black Bart, as he is now named, has settled in. At first, he would not let them out of his sight. But now he is settled and happy and grateful and regal and wonderful and isn't this the happiest ending you could ever imagine?

I believe he was dumped exactly at that spot and there he waited and waited, his despair and depression and anxiety growing day by day, waiting for the people who dumped him to come back for him, because they couldn't have just left him way out there in the cold alone to die. He was unable to believe that.

In the end, he knew they wouldn't come back for him. He became depressed and desperate. He wanted love, safety, warmth, and he turned to the people who noticed him, pretty much the only ones. He chose them. They resisted for a time, but how could they turn him down, in the end?Black Bart in his Home Sweet Home. Finally.